dismalness was to be acted. The foppish custom of privileged spectators sitting on the stage on stools, with pages attendant, was a source of standing annoyance to the general audience, but stood its ground in an age of personal display against outcry, satire, and expense. The curtains in front of the stage ran upon a rod, and opened in the centre, and the stage itself seems to have had an enclosure of arras, answering the purpose of our side scenes, and towards the back where they were called traverses, they could be drawn and undrawn as required. In the centre of the stage, at the back, was a secondary stage, which may have been more or less permanent, and was of frequent employment in aid of the bold treatment by the dramatists of space generally as well as time. The break of level was assumed to account for any distance of perspective, and thus a double action might proceed in the same scene as independently as the several actions disposed at different heights, but of like scale, are depicted in a mediæval painting or on a panel of the gates of Ghiberti. Thus the ghosts might turn from Richard to Richmond, shown as sleeping in separate camps, or a double dialogue might proceed within a room and without. In the way of scenery, the utmost that was attempted or cared for seems to have been to put such fixed properties on and about the stage as would suggest the scene required. Tombs, rocks, hell-mouths, steeples, beacons, and trees are found in lists of properties, and also cities and battlements. The accounts of the Revels show that for plays before the court there were devices for counterfeiting thunder and lightning, for exhibiting the sun breaking through a cloud, burning mountains, a battlement of canvas; and payment was made for painting seven cities, one country house, one battlement, a mount, and two great cloths." Graves and trap-doors, ascents and descents from heaven were also provided for. The stage is constantly spoken of as strewn with rushes the custom even of palace-chambers, occasion, by excess of refinement, it was matted. on In Shakespeare's company several actors of eminence played on different instruments, and the band of eight or ten performers is supposed to have sat in an upper balcony, over what is now called the stage-box. The audience was not satisfied with costume at so cheap a rate as with scenery; personal bedizenment was the rule of the court and the weakness of the time, and the stage could not lag far behind the coxcombs who sate on stools about the front of it. Mythological personages were fitted out with some degree of appropriateness; as to the foreign and remotely historical, it would not be easy to say at what point the line was even usually drawn. It seems probable that something at least was done to show a difference from contemporary habits, and this is all the compromise that is necessary where the drama itself is the main interest. Female parts were always sustained by males. The names of the principal actors in Shakespeare's plays are printed at the beginning of the first edition of 1623, but with no statement of their several parts. Whatever excellence there may have been among the rest, it is only of two, Richard Burbage, chief in tragedy, and William Kemp in comedy, that enough seems to have been said to constitute special renown. This may lead us to think that the faintness of the tradition of Shakespeare's own powers as an actor is not inconsistent with his considerable merit. Rowe's inference from all he could gather was, that he was not distinguished as an extraordinary actor. "His name is printed, as the custom was in those times, amongst those of the other players, before some old plays, but without any particular account of what sort of parts he used to play; and, though I have enquired, I could never meet with any further account of him this way, than that the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet." A late tradition, reported by Capell and Oldys, imports that he played old Adam in As You Like It; and another, that he personated a king before Queen Elizabeth, who essayed to disturb his majesty by a mischievous recog nition. Davies, his contemporary, in his "Scourge of Folly," has these verses — "TO OUR ENGLISH TERENCE, MR. WILL. SHAKESPEARE. "Some say, good Will, which I in sport do sing, And been a king among the meaner sort. And honesty thou sow'st, which they do reap, So to increase their stock which they do keep." Besides allusions that are obscure, but perhaps not impossible to clear up, this notice corresponds with the tradition last cited, if it did not originate it, that Shakespeare not unfrequently took the kingly part,—a part, it must be said, which, as a rule, does not make large demands on histrionic talent; in general stateliness or earnestness the part of the Ghost in Hamlet has also a certain agreement with that of old Adam, which would lead us to think that the histrionic vein of the poet was not the light and voluble or the vehemently impassioned, though probably more exalted than the dull and level line of the "heavy fathers" of the modern classification. The Shakespearian characters that Burbage is known to have represented are, Shylock, Richard III., Prince Henry, Romeo, Henry V., Brutus, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Pericles, Coriolanus; like Garrick and Kean he was below the middle height, and is thus characterized by Richard Flecknoe in a description of “ an excellent actor," which he afterwards versified and applied directly to Burbage : "He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes as he never (not so much as in the 'tiring house) assumed himself again, until the play was done. He had all the parts of an excellent orator, animating his words with speaking, and speech with action, his auditors being never more delighted than when he spake, nor more sorry than when he held his peace: yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gesture maintaining it still unto the height, &c." Will Kemp was considered not an unworthy successor of Tarlton, whose extemporising powers he emulated by those additions to his parts that Shakespeare denounces in Hamlet with so little mercy. The secret of his popularity does not appear in his original Merriments that have come down, but this is the fate of extemporisers; his contemporaries relished him highly, and have left many allusions to his wit and whim, both off the stage and on it. We have to thank the carelessness of old copyists or printers, who sometimes put the actor's name for that of his part, for knowing that he was the original Dogberry of Much Ado about Nothing, and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. We have the statement of Malone, a credible witness, that in " some tract," of which he had forgotten to preserve the title, John Heminge, one of the original editors of the plays, was said to have been the original performer of Falstaff. The leading members of the company so far as their wills have been traced, appear to have acquired considerable property; they are for the most part family men and householders, and take and rather rejoice in the style of gentlemen, and do not forget to leave tokens of attachment to their surviving fellows, whose kindly memory they evidently count upon and prize. On February 4, 1596, James Burbage bought of Sir William More, of Loseby, in Surrey, part of a large house in the Blackfriars, and soon after proceeded to turn it into the Blackfriars theatre. The scheme was opposed by some inhabitants of the precinct, who prayed the Privy Council "to take order that the same roomes may be converted to some other use, and that no playhouse may be used or kept there." The opposition, however, was ineffectual, and the playhouse was established. Burbage's sons tell its history shortly in their answer to the Lord Chamberlain, 1635, from which it appears that it was afterwards leased to one Evans, who first sett up the boyes commonly called the Queenes Majesties Children of the Chappell. In processe of time the boyes grow. ing up to bee men were taken to strengthen the Kings service and the more to strengthen the service. . . . [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condall, Shakspeare, &c." [Halliwell's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," p. 90.] It is thus clear that 1603 is the earliest date at which it is possible for Shakespeare and the Burbages to have acted at Blackfriars, for there was no King's Service" before the accession of James 1 66 The four years 1596-99, furnish a fuller cluster of facts for the biography of the poet than occurs in any other part of his career, and this is the more satisfactory as he had then attained the acme both of his genius and his fortune,—an acme, however, not preceding decline, for he sustained the elevation to the last. As regards the annals of his art, it is in 1597-8 that Francis Meres furnishes the celebrated notice of his works and reputation, so often referred to, in his "Palladis Tamia," "Wit's Treasury" being the second part of "Wit's Commonwealth "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c. "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for tragedy and comedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labours Lost, his Love's Labours Won, his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. "As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speak with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." An Epigram by Weever, published in 1599, must have been written about the same time,-it runs thus,-not throughout very intelligibly. AD GULIELMUM SHAKESPEARE. "Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue I swore Apollo got them and none other; Their rosy-tainted features clothed in tissue, |